Following directions counts for a lot. In a business class I'm taking through work, my boss said he'd literally throw out any submissions longer than five pages. Listening to authority is part of the grade.

Sounds to me like your teacher spends too much time on the Internet (possibly this site) to just pull a TL;DR. I'd try talking to your teacher about it, and if you don't agree with what he's saying or can't see eye to eye, than definitely go to the principle. If you went over the page limit then it's kind of your fault, but the teacher should still be reading it, and marking you on the other parts, such as grammar/spelling, topic, supporting arguments, etc. His job is to teach you, which would involve reading your work, pointing out (and marking) on the good parts, and explaining what you did wrong on the bad parts. He should've explained his issues instead of just TL;DR.

Most of my professors in college who would not read anything over the set page limit. If the limit was five pages and you went on to the sixth, they would stop reading and grading at the end of the fifth page—even if it was three words onto the next page. While no one likes to be dismissed with a "til;dr", teachers often have a lot of papers to grade. I usually have about 180 students a semester. That's a lot of essays to grade, and students usually want immediate feedback, not to mention detailed and helpful feedback. If even 1/3 of my students exceed the page requirements, it adds considerably to my work load (remember that I still have lessons to plan, classes to teach, and a life to live). I'd also add that most of the time when students exceed the maximum page requirement, their papers are rambling messes. Content editing is an important skill to learn. Just because an essay/story is longer does not mean it's better. So no, a teacher shouldn't still read it and correct the grammar/spelling; the student should follow assignment guidelines. I realize this might not be the case with OP, and yes, I also realize this is a long comment.

Yes, I am a professor. I teach Statistics. Your comment about exceeding expectations is asinine with what I wrote. I used an example of a 15 page paper on a 2-3 page limit. If it was 3.5 or so, I would not automatically fail them. As someone else said, often long papers are rambling messes. Being concise is a great skill.

That being said, his teacher was still a jerk for writing tl;dr.

Lastly, I leave you with a fun quip. When I started my dissertation, my advisor quoted Mark Twain, "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead."

If they weren't following directions for the page limit then that warrants the teacher's reaction. My professor said that if our 20 slide project is 40 slides long he's not even going to bother reading it. Follow directions.

Teachers are all different. My English teachers would automatically fail a paper if the words "really", "very", or "a lot" were used anywhere other than a quote or source. On the other hand, I had a 2100 word short story assigned and I was already 2000+ words over, my TA said that I need at least 3 more pages.

If he was informed of a word count limit and he would fail if he went too far over it, then that's his fault. If there was not word count/page count I would take it to the principal.

What if there were no clear boundaries on how many pages/words it was supposed to be?

Even if there was I don't think doing more work than what was required means the student is lazy. Disregarding of the rules? Yeah. But I think you need to look up the definition of the word lazy. You clearly have no idea what it actually means.

A long paper doesn't necessarily mean not lazy. My writing tends to be pretty top notch, and is almost always shorter than the requirements. An overly long paper can mean you didn't properly plan/think through what you wanted to say, and instead compensated by adding lots of fluff.

Being lazy has nothing to do with it. I am a teacher, and I've done it too. When you have 30 papers to grade, you have to expect students to follow directions and stick to the page limits. Not the teachers fault unless it was a small class and no page limit. Wet don't have that information. Just another student blaming the teacher.

You are not an educator, so don't call an educator lazy without more than this to back it up. I don't know what YOUR job is, but I would not tell you how to do it. If there are specific directions on how long a response should be, then students need to follow directions. When you have 35 papers to correct and a student tacks on 5 extra (most likely unnecessary) pages, they deserve to lose credit. If the teacher didn't give a limit, then they were definitely in the wrong, but that doesn't give YOU the right to tell someone how to do their job and/or call them names when you know next to nothing about their job.

If it didn't follow the assignment requirements/guidelines, then he certainly can. Teachers assign minimum and maximum page requirements for many reasons: 1. They know how long it should take for students to convey ideas/information 2. Page limits help students to condense ideas (after all, brevity *is* the soul of wit) 3. Teachers like to be able to give detailed, useful feedback to students. This is not possible if students turn in a novel and want feedback and a grade within a week.

He can if there was a word/page limit. We don't know enough about the situation, i wish the OP had included whether there was a limit or not. That would make a world of difference between hitting FYL or YDI.